


I've waited ten long years just to look in the mirror

by Cosmic_Retribution



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen, I definitely get into headcanon territory re: Vanitas, Kingdom Hearts 3 spoilers, POV Second Person, Post-Kingdom Hearts 3, Roxas has anxiety and also personhood/existential issues in general, Roxas is really really paranoid/defensive of his right to exist, forgive me if I’m wrong on some details and stuff?, kh is complicated lmao im out here doin my entire best, light Ventus & Vanitas if you squint, mentions of abuse, mentions of canon-compliant non-graphic character death, mild anxiety attack/flashback, other characters mentioned but are not present
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 17:23:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17750243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cosmic_Retribution/pseuds/Cosmic_Retribution
Summary: There’s concern in his voice, so you quietly take a deep breath, in, out, and banish the static from your throat.“I’m alright,” you say, and it’s as true as you can muster. “Let’s talk, then.”___Roxas and Ventus have a talk about their nearly identical appearances.





	I've waited ten long years just to look in the mirror

**Author's Note:**

> I finished KH3, immediately sat down and wrote this whole thing. I thought it was funny how those two just kinda looked at each other, noticed they had the same exact face and said literally nothing about it ever.
> 
> I'm also assuming that neither of them somehow intrinsically know all the things that Sora experienced while their respective hearts slept hidden in his. I'm sorry if I've got anything wrong in this fic, this is just kind of my take on how this interaction would go down. Warning for Roxas and his existential issues in general; he has what I think can be more-or-less described as a flashback, so if that kind of content is upsetting for you, please take care and read with caution.

“So,” he says and, just like that, he opens a door.

He doesn’t stutter or waver or betray any hesitation. It’s one word, just like that.

There's a lot to consider.

Momentarily you do consider acting obtuse about it. _So?_ you can practically hear yourself question back, fake-innocent. It makes your head hurt, the whole thing. It makes a vague, near-imperceptible static lap at the back of your eyeballs and it buzzes deep in the base of your skull. But one doesn’t peer into a mirror to deny the shape of his own reflection, so you steel yourself.

“I don’t think we’ve been really-technically introduced,” he continues, the moment having stretched on too long.

“Roxas,” you say.

“I’m Ventus,” says the other boy in a voice more easy and relaxed than it ought to be. “But my friends call me Ven.” You wonder if that’s an invitation or a warning, and then you wonder if you really are the only one on edge.

He’s swinging his legs, you notice, over the edge of the palm tree’s trunk. Your other friends-- the collective group of groups-- have more or less retired for the day, which leaves you and him, alone. The sun is setting, but a thin patchwork of clouds hangs between that and the world today. It’s not the most impressive one you’ve seen. It’s nothing compared to the sunsets in Twilight Town. But you’ve learned to count your blessings all the same.

“I haven’t really gotten a chance to talk to you, yet, one-on-one,” says Ventus. “Crazy couple of years we’ve been having, huh,” he jokes, and mechanically you turn the corners of your mouth up in response; a thin smile, not quite forced and not quite natural, you can’t quite tell if you mean it or not.

“Uh-huh,” you agree, smart as ever. (You don’t know what to say to him. You don’t know how you _could_ know what to say to him.) But he laughs a little in response to your stiffness and says, “I hope this isn’t a bad time?”

There will never be a _good_ time, so you shake your head a little over-emphatically. “No, no, it’s fine. You-- you want to know why I look just like you?”

“Well, I don’t exactly believe you have all the answers,” Ventus says, not unkindly. “But you’ve got some of the pieces of the puzzle. And I have some of them. I thought, uh, we could talk about it.”

“You look nervous,” Ventus says again when you fail to piece together a coherent and topical sentence to reply with in time. There’s concern in his voice, so you quietly take a deep breath, in, out, and banish the static from your throat.

“I’m alright,” you say, and it’s as true as you can muster. “Let’s talk, then.”

Ventus folds his hands in his lap and says, “first thing’s first: it’s important to establish that we’re on the same page, so let’s begin with some details. Which one of us came first? I’ll, uh, venture that it’s probably myself, but hey, you know what they say about assuming.”

You know, distantly, that Ventus’s heart slept within Sora’s before yours did. And you suspect, even more distantly, that it may have slept in yours for a time, too. So you nod your head in agreement. “I guess I’ve only been around for a few years,” you say.

“Can I ask how exactly that works out? You look like you can’t be younger than fourteen or fifteen.”

“I’m a Nobody,” you say, and he pauses, apparently searching his memory for anything he knows on that topic. “Or maybe _was_ a Nobody,” you continue. “I’m not… quite clear on it all.” You decide not to wait and make him guess at what you mean. “Do you want me to explain?”

“Sure,” he says, averting his eyes briefly, checking the position of the sun in the sky. They have time.

“A Nobody is formed… when a heart and a body are separated. An isolated heart grows hollow and hungry with darkness, and becomes a Heartless. An isolated body, that’s a Nobody. A lot of Nobodies become distorted and husk-like without their hearts, but… other times, they end up more like me and Axel.”

“Okay,” Ventus says, his face contemplative. “I’m following so far. But you and Axel…”

“We do have hearts, yes,” you explain. “Before Axel became a Nobody, he was named Lea, but I guess you know that already. And back when I first began to exist, when I was first recruited by Organization Thirteen, I was-- well, Axel used to tease me a lot, called me a zombie,” you laugh a little, “but he wasn’t really _wrong_. I just… I did what I was told, went where I was sent. I had no heart, and no memories, but Axel decided to become my friend anyways.” You smile at the memory, the memories, all of them. “And later, when Xion showed up, I passed on that kindness to her. The three of us became really close, and… despite believing we had no hearts, we cared about each other. And the thing is, that bond is what _makes_ a heart. So despite the way we started out, we became somebody, in time. Does that make sense?”

“I think so.”

“Well, what I came to find out was that before I became a Nobody, I was-- I was Sora. Or part of him.” You leave him to turn that over in his head, make of that what he will, and brace yourself.

What he says, though, catches you totally off guard, because it’s “I have an evil clone, you know.”

And his delivery is so grave and deadpan serious. Just like that.

You blink, and then you laugh a little, despite yourself. “Okay?”

“It’s true,” Ventus insists, and then he finally cracks a smile. “Well, I don’t quite know if ‘evil’ is entirely fair. And I guess 'clone' is kinda reductive.”

“So,” you say, “you have an evil clone, but he’s neither evil, nor a clone.”

“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds ridiculous,” Ven says, and you laugh, you can’t help it.

“Want to explain how your not-evil not-clone factors in?” You ask, grinning.

“I was getting to that,” he mumbles, his face getting a bit red. He pauses for a bit, thinking, and says, “when I was really young… My friends, Terra and Aqua, were students under Master Eraqus and Master Xehanort. I was, too, but they were older than me, and a lot closer to their mastery exams. But Master Xehanort, well… he mistreated me in secret. Really badly,” he says, his voice getting quiet.

“I’m sorry,” you say, reaching out an awkward hand to comfort him, but retracting it just as fast. “You don’t have to talk about it if it’s hard for you.”

“It’s alright,” Ven says. “Long story short, I couldn’t handle the terrible things he was putting me through, and as a result, he developed-- Vanitas. He protected me, absorbed the abuse and the painful memories, and then we were separated-- he was the darkness in my heart. But he stood at Master Xehanort’s side until the bitter end,” Ven recalls sadly. “Sora and I-- we confronted him, the final time we saw him. We told him that he didn’t have to _be_ darkness, that he could come with us. But he said… he said that it was in being my shadow that he was closest to me.”

You’re quiet at that. It’s a lot, and it’s sad. It’s an experience you certainly don’t envy.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Ven continues, though, beginning to look frustrated. “It didn’t have to end like that. Chasing after me-- threatening me-- mistreating me, hurting me and my friends, that’s not close at all. And it was sad, because he was wrong, but I looked at him and I saw that he wholeheartedly believed that his life was best spent as a shadow.”

“So that’s my evil clone story,” Ven concludes after another moment. “I’m sure you’re wondering how it all connects.”

You had been perfectly content just hearing out the story, come to think of it, but you say, “a little.”

“Well, Vanitas looked… Sora and Vanitas look almost exactly alike. They had the same face and the same build, they had the same hairstyle even, before Sora changed his when he got a little older. Vanitas’s hair was black, and his eyes were amber, but other than that? Splitting image, those two.”

“I see,” you say, and you don’t. It hits you like a big dumb truck. You don’t know where to piece that all in, and you’re reeling from it, and you don’t quite grasp why.

“So… for me, I guess, it makes sense that when my heart took shelter, it was in him. Sora, I mean.” He looks far away, his eyes fixed far beyond the pre-dusk horizon. “In a way, it was just like it always had been for me. I took shelter in Vanitas’s shadow, all those years ago, you could say, when I crumpled under Master Xehanort’s treatment. That my heart ended up with a boy like Sora, and that those two should look alike, it seems poetic somehow, or maybe it seems like it must have been fate. So you, then.” He fixes his gaze on you now.

“Wh- what about me?” is as intelligent a reply as you can muster.

“This is just a guess,” Ven starts, “and maybe you’d know better than me, or maybe neither of us know… but if you’re a Nobody, and you came from Sora, who is connected to Vanitas and to myself…”

You feel yourself try to connect the dots. You feel your head fill with nothingness.

“…then I guess you must be a pretty special case, huh? You said Axel once was Lea, or I guess still is, or always was, I-- I’m not totally sure how you guys work, to be honest. But what I’m saying is it seems like you didn’t really _come from_ anybody in particular, if you think about it. I mean, you said you used to be part of Sora, and so was I, and you and I look alike, I think, because of that. But you’re not like either of us. It’s pretty interesting.”

You’re silent. A moment passes, and another, and he says, “or, uh, maybe I’ve got that wrong. I don’t really know.”

Your ears buzz, your throat is full of cotton, the backs of your eyelids are a malfunctioning television screen.

You see yourself, small, pale, drowning in the blackness of your crisp new Organization Thirteen robes. You see Xion, distressed, and then you see yourself picking up a branch. _Roxas,_ she says, _that’s a stick_. You see her lips move, but here, you don’t hear her. You see your keyblade in Sora’s hands (his keyblade in his hands), you see Axel beside you on the clock tower at sunset, you see Axel calling for you, pulling you back, you see yourself holding your head after a dizzying vision-- a dizzying memory-- you see Sora, asleep, unresponsive, in a room all pale and bleak, you see, you see, you see--

“That makes sense,” you say.

You were afraid-- irrationally, you realize-- that he would feel that you _owe_ him something (if not just your visage), the way you owed Sora for a long time, owed him the ownership of your life, the right to exist in your stead.

But you swallow the static in your throat and reason that that’s all behind you now, and there’s no reason that Ven would make such a demand of you. You’re you now. You’re allowed to exist. It's okay. 

You let out a breath you didn’t know you’d been holding and say, “well, Ventus, it was... It was nice talking with you. It’s getting dark now, so we should go join the others.”

He slides down from his perch on the palm tree, and you follow suit. “Okay,” he says. “But really, please call me Ven.”

You smile, and this time it’s warm, and there’s no doubt in your mind that it’s sincere.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this fic! The switch between the narrative calling Ventus by his full name to just by "Ven" is intentional, and marks about the spot where Roxas started to relax. And in case "you didn't really come from anybody[...] you're not like either of us" is confusing or unclear, what's meant by that is Roxas isn't Sora per se in the same way that Axel is Lea. 
> 
> (Title is from the song "Freak Show" by Set It Off.)


End file.
